Abstract:
Jorge Colaço is a Portuguese painter who started his artistic career as painter, oil painting on canvas and making cartoons for newspapers. In the early twentieth century, due to curiosity and interest in tiles, he devoted himself to tile painting.
The vastness and the quality of his artwork (tile and frame panels) required mastery and accuracy in drawing and painting, but also a developed knowledge of the ceramic techniques, which the artist acquired in the factories where he worked: Sacavém Factory (Fábrica de Sacavém) and Lusitânia Factory (Fábrica Cerâmica Lusitânia).
In the context of the inventory and identification of his artistic creation we highlight the conservation issues. Towards a deeper understanding of these problems it was necessary to corroborate by laboratorial analysis the information provided by written and oral sources about the techniques he once used.
For the analytic part of this research we were limited by the samples made available that were nonetheless considered sufficient to draw conclusions: two samples of indoor polychrome panels from Casa do Alentejo in Lisbon, painted while he worked at the Sacavém Factory; and one sample retrieved from the outdoor panels that line the façade of the Santo Ildefonso Church, in Oporto, painted while at the Lusitânia Factory.
